Seamless payments, global identity and verifications, investment and inheritance
The Wall Street Journal coined Facebook’s blockchain project as Project Libra, approaching allies such as Mastercard and Visa. MIT’s Christian Catalini is said to be working on Facebook’s cryptocurrency efforts. We know that two of the top lieutenants of Mark Zuckerberg are indeed on the team — David Marcus and Kevin Weil. Facebook is hiring aggressively for blockchain roles.I’m excited about the long term cryptocurrency utility and adoption of blockchain technologies. This is a speculation on the 10 on-chain possibilities that Facebook’s efforts could power for the global citizen. What’s your take?
1. Peer to Peer Payments
With a Facebook USD-backed cryptocurrency, users can pay each other for meals, rent and anything that’s needed. Venmo might get jealous.
2. Peer to Peer Verification of Identity
It’s a global and connected world, communities and persons can mutually verify identities to ensure that bad players are weeded out. A verified identity will have a check mark across their name with the no. of verifications. Peers are incentivized to deal only with other peers with strong verified identities.
3. Voting and Delegation
To keep communities moving forward, it will be nuts for us to make every single decision and vote on what’s possible in our communities, meetup groups, social clubs and organizations. Everyone in the communities should be able to delegate or vote directly for decisions to be made on proposals and drafts to their benefit.
4. Invoiced and Pay for Goods and Services
Businesses can invoice and charge users for their products and services. They should also be able to pay their employees, file taxes and do all kinds of financial functions seamlessly.
5. Lending and Working with Credit
Businesses should be able to automatically extend lines of credit and have payment periods in working with other businesses. This will enable more efficient business operations.
6. Invest in Securities
Regular citizens and accredited investors should be able to invest through smart contracts and be issued securities for the businesses they’ve invested in.
7. Access any e-service, game, app
Using their identity, citizens can authenticate and login for e-services, games and applications. They can opt to have personalized experiences only upon authentication of their verified identity.
8. Sharing and Retrieving Data with 3rd Party e-service, game, app
Should a game require photos of the user from another service, the user should be able to authenticate and grant permissions for one-time sharing or retrieval. Without authentication of verified identity, services will not be able to perform such actions.
9. Travel and Immigration using their Global Identity
With their identity, they could use their mobile device and private keys to authenticate themselves at immigration or when they check in for their flights. Doing so enables them to pass through seamlessly through the expedited immigration counters. Public travel records are available for countries to access.
10. Assets and Information Inheritance
Everything accessible by the verified identity of the citizen would be up for inheritance programmed to the citizen’s preference. Assets, information, services, securities owned can be passed on easily.
There’re many possibilities for Facebook to experiment. There will be barriers to adoption. We’re definitely excited about how mass adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies will happen in the next few years.
